“I’ve got a new law for you mate, it’s called survival of the fittest, it’s called fuck you we’re the Riot Club.”

In an oak-panelled room in Oxford, ten young bloods with cut-glass vowels and deep pockets are meeting, intent on restoring their right to rule. Members of an elite student dining society, the boys are bunkering down for a wild night of debauchery, decadence and bloody good wine. But this isn’t the last huzzah: they’re planning a takeover.

Welcome to the Riot Club.

Laura Wade is a graduate of the Royal Court Young Writers Programme. Her first play for the Royal Court, Breathing Corpses played in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in 2005 and won her the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright, the Pearson Playwrights Best Play Award, the George Devine Award and an Olivier Award Nomination for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre. She also worked on a collaborative project, Catch, for the Royal Court in 2006, with a group of female contemporaries. Her other plays include Other Hands and Colder Than Here at Soho Theatre.

Age guidance 14+
Running time 2hrs 45mins approx, including one interval

Reviews

4 starsThe Sunday Times, By Naomi Alderman, April 25th 2010

Oxford University thrives on mythology – on the stories that past and present students tell about themselves. Heres one: when I was at Oxford, a man I knew, an ex-public schoolboy, obtained the keys to another mans room and – how to put this? – passed a bowel movement on his floor. On purpose. And left it there. When his friend wanted to know what he’d done to deserve this, he explained it was an expression of friendship. Just like they’d done at his school, he said.

The characters in Laura Wade’s play Posh would have no difficulty with this logic. They are members of the ‘Riot Club’ who take delight in destroying one another’s possessions, not to mention emotional wellbeing, as a sign of a troubling sort of friendship. To join the club, members have to agree to have their room ‘trashed’, which includes, for example, suspending their clothes from the light fitting, so for a second ‘it looks like someone hanged themselves’, and having another man masturbate on their books. The Riot Club is most famed for its termly dinners, which begin with toasts and ceremony, and end with the destruction of the room they are held in. The play takes place mostly around one such dinner.

Wade herself didnt attend Oxford, although I wouldnt have been able to tell from the play: its characters and settings were extremely convincing. Most of us, of course, will never participate in a social circle quite like this, so its hard to tell how accurately the particular mores of the club are portrayed, but the dawning realisation for most ordinary Oxford students that there is a social stratum they can never reach – that, as one of the clubs members puts it, ‘theres another floor their lift doesnt go up to’ – is very real. It was this realisation that sowed the seed for my new novel, The Lessons, in which my middle-class narrator, James, goes up to Oxford and joins the wealthy set of the mercurial Mark, but finds himself increasingly out of his depth. I met people at Oxford who were wealthier and better connected than anyone Id previously encountered: one student was dropped off at the start of term by a diplomat relative in an ambassadorial car; several had trust funds. I was fascinated by these privileged lives, but noticed that an excess of money didnt seem to make them happier and ended up stripping some people of the ambitions and desires that keep the rest of us creatively engaged with life. I loved Oxford for its beauty and intellectual atmosphere; I hated it for its narrowness and pockets of privilege. Both these feelings have gone into The Lessons.

The sound most frequently made by the Riot Club – the drunken roaring of young upper-class men – evoked an almost Pav lovian reaction of dread in me. Perhaps because they behaved with an air of such entitlement, I ended up believing the university was really meant for men like this, not for studious middle-class Jewish girls.

There is, of course, a topical element to the play. The Riot Club is based on the real-life Oxford-based Bullingdon Club, whose motto is ‘I like the sound of breaking glass’, and whose former members include Boris Johnson and David Cameron. One doesnt have to be an advocate of class struggle to be disturbed by the idea that the mayor of our capital and the leader of the opposition once enjoyed smashing up private property before leaving a shower of banknotes in their wake as a humiliating recompense.

Wade herself is clearly disturbed by the club, although the sense of menace develops slowly across the play. At the start, the club members are mostly figures of fun. Guy Bellingfield, played with perfect overeager oiliness by Joshua McGuire, wants to make a mark on the club, but only by rethinking its catering. Ed Montgomery (Kit Harington), it emerges, hid his teddy bear from the room-trashing. For the first hour, it seems this might be a light comedy: the traditional British pursuit of laughing at the upper classes and their foibles. However, darker undertones emerge, then explode at the end in a way I found somewhat implausible.

There are fine depictions of the char acters representing the real world: Chris, the landlord of the pub where the dinner takes place (Daniel Ryan); his waitress daughter, Rachel (Fiona Button); and Charlie, the prostitute the club members book to service them during the meal (Charlotte Lucas). The two women, in particular, are played as the sanest characters in the face of increasing levels of sexual threat from drunk, aggressive young men. The staging is interesting, too: the boxed-in space of the formal dining room where the action takes place is surrounded by an industrial landscape, suggesting that the Riot Club is an anachronistic bubble within a utilitarian but colourless Britain.

It is one of the great problems of modern Britain – and of Oxford University, a quint essentially British institution – that we want to be proud of our history and traditions at the same time as understanding that they contain much to cause us shame. At my old college, Lincoln, on Ascension Day, senior students go up to the roof of Front Quad and hurl down hot pennies – heated in the oven – to waiting children from local schools. The children wear gloves; its all good fun. Yet this tradition has its roots in a particularly cruel form of charity: wealthy sons of nobility tossing coins to poor town children for the amusement of watching them burn themselves. Is it a hideous history, best forgotten, or a quaint ritual, important to preserve? This tension is everywhere in Oxford.

At the end of Poshs first act, the most aggressive club member, in sightfully and convincingly portrayed by Leo Bill, has a tour de force speech in which he rails against the levelling forces in modern Britain. The landlord ‘thinks he can have anything if he works hard enough… thinks his daughters getting a useful education at Crapsville College… thinking theyre cultured cause they read a big newspaper and eat asparagus and pretend not to be racist… I am sick to f***ing death of poor people’. Posh is thoughtful, engaging, funny and ultimately troubling. It runs for almost three hours, mostly set in a single room, but feels pacey and wide-ranging. At its heart is a moral question: do we think fairness should be our most important value, or is it more vital to retain the eccentric colour of our history, even at the risk of creating monsters?

Class continues to be the great British theme, however much we might like to pretend it has gone away. It is a part of our national story; the days when Britain was the greatest power on earth were also the days of strictly enforced class boundaries. The empire we exported was based on the premise that our upper class was destined to rule not just other Britons, but the world. Our stately homes were built by these people, our impressive national buildings commissioned by them, our universities founded by them. The question posed by Posh, and by the continued existence of clubs such as the Bullingdon, is to what extent we still consider them, and their values, admirable
5 starsTime Out, By Sam Marlowe, April 20th 2010

Laura Wade’s depiction of wealth and privilege is savagely funny, but it’s undercut by an observation as coolly sharp as cut glass: there’s a reason why the upper-class dolts she portrays behave as if they and their kind run Britain – it’s because, on the whole, they do. And with an election looming, her play is a timely warning against making that inequality manifest by handing the keys of No 10 to a former member of just such an elitist institution as Wade and director Lindsey Turner show us, in hideous, braying full flow.

At a rural gastropub, the Riot Club – an Oxford University dining society closely related to the real-life Bullingdon – meets for its regular huzzah, at which it is customary to get absolutely ‘chateaued’ before wrecking the premises. But this evening, all is not blue-blooded brotherly love. Discontented members, believing that the club is failing to live up to its notoriety, are angling to seize its presidency from the current incumbent. Guy (Joshua McGuire) tries to curry favour by devising a menu of repulsive excess, Harry (Harry Hadden-Paton) hires ‘a prozzer’ and Dimitri (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) arranges a post-prandial jaunt to Reykjavik. Cracks in the camaraderie appear: Greek Dimitri is on the receiving end of racist jibes, a new boy is pilloried for his ‘Brideshead’-ish teddy bear – ‘It’s a family heirloom!’ he protests – and another’s sexual confusion erupts in an ugly act of macho posturing involving the pub landlord’s daughter. And all of them seethe with resentment at what they regard as the erosion of respect due to them as a birthright, and at a modern world in which their family’s country piles must be thrown open to plebeian visitors and poor Mummy, decamped to the Knightsbridge flat, despairs at the influx of Arabs in the area.

The action is framed by two scenes in which Guy’s Tory MP godfather (Simon Shepherd), ensconced in a gentleman’s club that is essentially a grown-up version of the Riot, outlines the importance of allegiance and the way in which the old school tie binds the privileged together, ensuring that they collaborate to protect and perpetuate their position of power. The play is a little overlong, its build towards violent climax inevitable. But as grotesque as Turner’s superbly acted production maybe, at its core it’s also chillingly lifelike and horribly pertinent. Nastily effective.

The Independent, By Kate Bassett, April 18th 2010

The Royal Court is doing its darndest to sabotage the Conservatives’ election campaign. That’s what it looks like anyway, because Posh Laura Wade’s new main house play is a fictionalised group portrait of something not that far from the Bullingdon Club.

If anyone needs reminding, that’s the dining club of super-rich and aristocratic Oxford University chaps whose longstanding custom it is to smash up local restaurants, and then escape trouble by throwing money at the gobsmacked staff. David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson are old Bullingdon boys.

In Lyndsey Turner’s superbly cast ensemble production, nine young toffs and their feckless president, Tom Mison’s James, descend on a gastro pub in the Oxfordshire countryside. They hire a private room ox-blood red with antlers on the wall and dress up in archaic tail-coated uniforms, as in those 1980s photographs of Cameron and co. Except this bunch call themselves the Riot Club and, since they’re using an iPhone to check that a call girl is on her way, the setting must be now. Thus Wade keeps one step clear of a potentially libellous biodrama, while exploring the broader possibilities of a political and economic allegory.

Her point is partly plus a change. In a darkly satirical vein, these arrogant twerps who regard top City and parliamentary posts as their birthright build up to their act of shameless vandalism, while preserving the Club’s ludicrous traditions. They bray the National Anthem, make endless toasts to long-dead members, and no one is allowed to leave the room. Leaving the room is a club offence, so sick bags are provided.

What’s hair-raising, as well as comical, is how coarsely bigoted these supposedly well-bred chaps are behind closed doors, slipping on the mask of abstemious decency whenever they have to placate the landlord, Daniel Ryan’s burly Chris. There’s a chilling trace of Patrick Hamilton’s 1920s thriller Rope in these young gents’ hidden brutality.

The tension mounts as they indulge in leadership in-fighting (a touch of New Labour there?) and as the masks begin to slip. This could all end in bloodshed. Leo Bill’s drunken, vituperative Alistair rails against small businessmen like this landlord for wrecking the financial status quo, and his chums turn their attention to the waitress, the landlord’s not entirely obliging daughter, Rachel (Fiona Button).

More intellectual brilliance would have been welcome. The political arguments are somewhat fuzzy even when Alistair is sober, and there is a whiff of demonising melodrama about the close, when he is conspiratorially recruited as future PM material. If there is a stand-out performance, it’s David Dawson as the fey Hugo, with his feverish, glittering grin. However, everyone is superb: this is an array of young acting talent to rival that of The History Boys.

4 starsThe Financial Times, By Ian Shuttleworth, April 18th 2010

Seldom can a shows opening night have been so topical in so many ways. The fictitious Riot Club in Laura Wades play is loosely inspired by the real-life Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, which counts both Conservative leader David Cameron and shadow chancellor George Osborne among its former members, so a press performance on the night of the televised party leaders debate seemed fortuitous. Then one of the 10 young toffs whose bibulous dinner is portrayed announces that theyre going on somewhere afterwards. To Reykjavik, in fact. Were going tonight? asks another. Er, not on the night an Icelandic volcano cloud halts all flights to and from Britain. Rather less fortuitous, that one.

The Eyjafjallajkull eruption would be beyond them; but otherwise there seems to be little these young bloods do not instinctively believe they can bend to their will. Wades play is not simply, if at all, a broadside in the class war. What is under the microscope is not patrician privilege in itself (although one of the meals ritual toasts can only be delivered by someone with an aristocratic title), but the sense of entitlement that informs it.

The blithe assurance with which they set out to get bladdered and trash a restaurants private dining room is fundamentally no different from the bravado of a bling-laden posse pouring Dom Prignon on to the floor of a nightclub (the play is punctuated by bizarre a capella renditions of RnB numbers) or of a petty benefit fraudster…and, indeed, these nobs share some of the same suppressed insecurities. It is significant that their most withering contempt is directed not towards the proles but towards the middle classes, whose aspirations and sheer numbers have wrested so much power away from them.

Director Lyndsey Turner has crafted a fine ensemble production, which does its best to keep a lid on broad comedic playing for fear of attenuating the plays power. Leo Bill gradually emerges as the most dangerous of the Rioters in several ways, with Fiona Button and Charlotte Lucas each shaping up as more than the token females they might at first appear. The violent climax and the Machiavellian coda are both predictable, but neither falls flat. So is this a play whose time has come? Check back after the election next month.
4 starsThe Evening Standard, By Henry Hitchings, April 16th 2010

To most people the phenomenon of the Oxbridge dining society seems about as real as a unicorns horn. The prospect of a government that features more than one alumnus of this gilded world feels distressingly weird.

In Laura Wades beautifully observed, very funny play, that world is anatomised. Her invention, the Riot Club, is a kind of Bullingdon lite an Oxford coterie made up of minor aristos, landed yobs and foreign plutocrats.

We focus on an end-of-term dinner, in the dining room of a rural gastropub conveniently remote from Oxford and the clubs bad reputation. Its an occasion for messy tomfoolery, flagrant snobbery and violence.

Chippy sophomore Guy, informed by his uncle that it was once normal to gorge on a 10-bird roast and smash every chandelier in sight, is inspired to up the ante. This term the menu is going to be special. And, as it turns out, others have big plans: getting a prozzer in, and jetting off somewhere unusual for a postprandial shindig.

The clubs members engage with one another in a curiously antagonistic style. For instance, when it emerges that the president has applied to work at a German bank, his application form is read out as if its the most toe-curling of pre-adolescent love letters.

The swanky horseplay, repellent yet fascinating, is brilliantly acted, while Lyndsey Turners skilful direction means theres never a dull moment. There are deft and surprising touches, such as a close harmony version of Wileys electro-grime anthem Wearing My Rolex. Surrealism is never far away.

The ensemble work is outstandingly good: fluid, layered, always plausible. The standout performances come from Henry Lloyd-Hughes, magnetic as sinister Dimitri, and Leo Bill, thrillingly repulsive as the reptilian Alistair.

There are flecks of implausibility. Would a Riot Club member really refer to the toilet and sneer at someone who called it a lavatory? Where are the gruesome initiation rituals? And the Riot Club members dont even drink all that much. Still, Wades gifts as a satirist are beyond doubt. While its conclusion strives a little too hard for immediate relevance, this play combines topicality with dramatic appeal. It mostly works a treat. To adopt the preposterous argot of its characters: Mate this is savage.
4 starsWhats On Stage, By Michael Coveney, April 16th 2010

Scabrously funny, disgustingly smug, and deeply disturbing, Laura Wades brilliant new play Posh shows a group of public school rich boys behaving badly in an Oxfordshire private dining club and lamenting their loss of a country they think they both own and created.

Clearly based on the Bullingdon at Oxford University (of which David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson were prominent members), the plays Riot Club is also a metaphor in the class divide, and represents a streak of political brutality in the Conservative Party that for the moment lies dormant as candidate Dave develops his compassionate image.

Its hugely ironic that one of Camerons big ideas is for a citizens army recruited to repair a damaged society, presumably the one duffed up by his chums in the Bullingdon. The most ferocious member of Wades Riot Club is Leo Bills ratty and vengeful Alistair Ryle who delivers a broadside against the mediocrity, poverty and aspirations of the hoi polloi, as well as chaps who keep their cheese in the fridge.

The others live in country houses overrun by tourists and one has been reduced to sneaking an application to join the Deutsche Bank. They assemble in Anthony Wards wittily conceived gastropub dining room in their evening dress of red bow ties, stripy waistcoats and gold-lapelled dinner jackets to get well and truly chateaued while consuming a ten-bird-roast and awaiting a local prostitute (Charlotte Lucas).

The evening develops as an orgiastic ritual of humiliation involving their jovial pub host (Daniel Ryan) and his waitress daughter Rachel (Fiona Button), who is studying languages at Newcastle (Youd need to, there says one of the wags). The climactic horror is the toff equivalent of the baby-stoning scene in Edward Bonds Saved; this is a classic Royal Court play with a view from the other end of the telescope.

Lyndsey Turners superb production makes great use of a capella songs (and the toreadors march from Carmen) to cover scene changes and heighten the raucous mood, which is enhanced with cunning beauty by Paule Constables lighting and includes cross fades to the be-wigged founding members of the club in a dissolving portrait.

That continuity is expressed in the scenes that book-end the dinner in an oak-panelled London club where a Tory grandee (Simon Shepherd) first encourages his nephew (Joshua McGuire, a new Tom Hollander) to maintain the Riots standards of excess and finally fingers Alistair (who should be wearing a tie) as the sort of chap they can ease out of trouble with the law and into a top job, perhaps even the top job.

Tom Mison as the secret banker, Henry Lloyd-Hughes as a Greek rich kid (hes arranged a post-prandial group outing to Reykjavik) and the extraordinary David Dawson as a febrile poet of the right also shine in a hand-picked cast that do wonderful injustice to the play of the year so far and a fantastic Court follow-through to Jerusalem and Enron.
4 starsThe Daily Telegraph, By Charles Spencer, April 16th 2010

As the three main party leaders debated live on television last night, the Royal Court marked the election campaign with a good, old-fashioned piece of class war.

Laura Wades Posh is a dark comedy mostly set during a riotous, drunken dinner of an Oxford club closely modelled on the real-life Bullingdon, which counts David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne among its former members.

Its a piece clearly designed to damage the Tory party at this sensitive time, but what was notable at the final preview of the play was just how many plummy accents there were in the stalls. The well-heeled and well-connected are beating a path to Posh. Perhaps they are hoping to relive the heady intoxicated days of their undergraduate youth, and recapture what Evelyn Waugh memorably described as the sound of English county families baying for broken glass.

The piece is undoubtedly entertaining, though I cant imagine David Cameron will enjoy it much. It persuasively captures that off-putting sense of entitlement that so often emanates from those who have been to leading public schools, and it captures the wit and intelligence of the characters, before they become hog-whimperingly drunk, as well as their revolting snobbery, condescension, cruelty and violence.

I suppose I also ought to declare a lack of interest here. Though often drunk and sometimes drugged in my own student days at Oxford, I was never a member of the Bullingdon, though I am listed as such on Wikipedia. Watching this portrait of hoorays turning swinish, Im cordially glad that I wasnt.

Wade captures the tribal language, the joshing and later the maudlin gibbering of these young blades with a maliciously sharp ear. And though not all 10 of the Riot Club members in their flashy tailcoats come to fully detailed life on stage, Lyndsey Turner directs a superbly assured and acted production that moves from uneasy laughter (the scene involving a dignified prostitute is a comic gem of social embarrassment) to something altogether darker and nastier.

Where I quarrel with the play is in its paranoid conspiracy theory that membership of clubs like the Bullingdon creates a network of power and influence in the politics of this country, a theory epitomised by an older, suavely sinister former member (Simon Shepherd) who appears in the opening and closing scenes, covering things up and pushing careers along. My bet is that Cameron and Co now all regard membership of the Bullingdon as more of a hindrance than a help.

Among the cast, Leo Bill as the most malign and hate-filled of the gang, David Dawson as a suave gay member, Richard Goulding as a genuinely likeable aristo and Tom Mison as the president who is beginning to loathe his own club are particularly memorable.

There is sterling work too, from Daniel Ryan as the pub landlord appalled to discover he has a bunch of upper-crust hooligans on his hands, Fiona Button as his plucky daughter and Charlotte Lucas as the call girl who puts the clubs members firmly in their place. The big question now is whether Dave, Boris and George will have the guts to see the show.

‘Wade hits a number of nails on the head. She pins down the rage the club’s members feel that their country has been stolen from them. She harpoons the masonic nature of much of English life in which self-perpetuating elites offer each other lifelong protection. Yet Wade also suggests that, when the chips are down, the Darwinian instinct for survival triumphs over the comradely ethos. All this is vividly portrayed and applicable to current politics’.By Michael Billington.